Personal Narrative: My Shift In Social Class

I grew up in the small town of Plymouth, Wisconsin, with my parents and my little brother. We were a middle class family during my childhood days but declined to that of a working class family as I grew into my teenage years, according to my mom. The shift in our social class was due to 3 major events which I have pinpointed as: my dad being laid off from his job for several months, my mom’s business declining, and the time when the economy tanked around 7-8 years ago (which is what lead to the first 2 events). My mom said that these days we could probably technically be referred to as lower middle class, but we’re considered working class because my parent’s don’t have white collared jobs. I realize that as a child and even a teenager I never
thought about our social ranking. From what I can recall, most families seemed to be kind of like ours, with the exception of a few who were a little more “well off”.
We live on a street right in the heart of the town (population: 8,500), on a square block with houses that all looked pretty similar in terms of size and physical appearance. My dad is an HVAC technician and my mom is a self-employed dance instructor. Our house is also especially important because the first floor of happens to be a dance studio where my mom runs her business out of, which is probably the main reason we have never even thought of moving. There was a slight change when it came to things I was able to do and places I was able to go. When I was younger, we went on a family vacation almost every summer, or at least every other summer. By the time I became a teenager, those vacations were long gone due to the fact that money became much tighter than what we were used to. We haven’t gone on a family vacation since I was in fourth grade. We also used to do many more fun things entertainment-wise when I was younger like go out to museums, the zoo, shopping malls, and other trips made purely for enjoyment purposes, however those trips started noticeably decreasing into picking and choosing what we were able to do very
carefully. If I would have known how many homeless people were present in Wisconsin, I wouldn’t have been so disappointed and childish about my home situation of not always getting the newest toys or having the nicest bedroom. Before coming to UW-Madison, I had never seen a homeless person before and I’m not sure if it was because my hometown didn’t have any, or if I wasn’t looking hard enough. According to the National Center for Homeless Education (2014), 1,168,354 children and youth were identified as homeless over the course of the 2011-2012 school year. This came as a shock to me because even though I had never had any experiences with homeless people in my hometown, the only homeless people I’ve seen around Madison have all been older adults, not children. It makes sense that children might become homeless based on the cost of housing in the area or parental job elimination, but it’s not an image that I had ever taken into account before watching documentaries on homelessness in this class. I believe that one of the main reasons my parents decided to live in Plymouth was because the housing isn’t nearly as expensive as the average living situation in Madison or other bigger cities.